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The Mind of an Inventor

Newsweek has an interview with Evan Schwartz, the author of “Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors.” Says Schwartz about inventors: “One quality that stands out: it’s the ability to find new problems that no one else even sees. The conventional view of inventors is, they’re good at solving problems. It’s really finding problems. Max Levchin was an expert in cryptography. Everyone thought there needed to be a secure way of paying people on the Internet. There were dozens of start-ups that failed because their solutions were so complicated. They required you to download a cryptography application onto your desktop and run the program every time you wanted to pay for something. People didn’t want to do that. So he came up with PayPal, where all the security features reside on a server, and the customer just sends an e-mail. He saw this problem in a completely different way. That’s what inventors do. They ask: how can I make this better?”